Give her what I didn't have.

I was the kid with twenty hours a week in the gym and no strength program underneath any of it.

I was an elite rhythmic gymnast — a Junior Olympian — when my back gave out. I'll never know for certain if it was avoidable. But I know exactly what wasn't there: nobody was building the foundation that lets a young body absorb the load a sport demands.

That gap is the thing almost every youth athlete has and almost none of them get filled. So I built the program I wish I'd had, and it starts with a simple truth from sports science.

Why strength comes first

Think of athletic development like a pyramid. The wide base is general physical preparation: strength, power, speed, mobility, conditioning. The narrow top is sport-specific skill. You can only build the top as high as the base is deep.

Kids who skip the base and specialize early get hurt more, not less, because they're asking a sport to do a job that strength work was supposed to do first. The fix isn't more practice. It's a foundation that makes everything above it safer and more powerful.

A year, periodized

Random workouts aren't a plan. Her year should have a shape to it, and each phase has a job.

That in-season piece is the part most programs get wrong, and it's the reason the athletes who train smart stay on the field the longest. There's a lot more underneath this, but this is the shape of it.